Basics

What
is Celtix?

Cetlix is an open source Java Web
services ESB implementation. It is based on JAX-WS 2.0.

What
is an ESB?

ESB stands for Enterprise Service Bus.
An ESB is the layer of technology that makes SOA possible. It enables
the abstraction by translating the messages defining the services
into data that can be manipulated by a physical process implementing
a service. Essentially, an ESB is the yarn that weaves a SOA
together.

What
is SOA?

SOA stands for Service-Oriented
Architecture. Service-Oriented Architecture is an approach to
software architecture with the goal to decouple the agents of work in
a software system from the functionality advertised by those agents.
An agent offers a contract, representing a service, which can then be
consumed by other software agents that require work to be done. In
SOA terms, the contract-offering agent is the Service Provider, and
the contract itself represents the Service. Using SOA, system
designers can describe the core functions of the system as service
elements that can be composed and reused to form business
applications.

Relationship
to other ESBs

How does Celtix
compare to other open source ESBs like Mule and ServiceMix?

Celtix is the only ESB that implements
the JAX-WS specification. Also, Celtix has the ability to send SOAP
messages over HTTP built-in, and it does not require any external
program for this functionality, like Apache Axis. Also, Celtix is not
based on a particular messaging technology. It supports JMS and comes
with ActiveMQ, but it can work with any JMS implementation. Celtix is
extensible, so it is possible to write other messaging transports for
Celtix since the messaging bus is not tightly bound to how Celtix
works.

How does Celtix
compare to commercial ESBs?

Due to the rapid innovation capability
of an open source community, Celtix is comparable, and ahead in some
ways, in capability to commercial Java-centric ESBs. For example,
Celtix is currently the only ESB with JAX-WS support. The
non-Java-centric ESBs complement and interoperate with Celtix to
provide additional transports and bindings, i.e. IONA's Artix product
provides additional capabilities to integrate with IBM MQ, CORBA,
Tuxedo, etc.

Relationship to
Other Open Source Projects

Does Celtix use
other open source projects?

Yes. Celtix is built and packaged using
Maven 2.0 from Apache. All of the documentation for the Celtix
project is written using OpenOffice 2.0.

Celtix also uses components from Spring
and Active MQ.

The Celtix team is also working with
the STP project at the Eclipse foundation to build a set of GUI tools
for developing SOAs.

What other open
source projects does Celtix work with?

Currently a number of open source
projects are in discussions with the Celtix project about taking
shared dependencies.

Are members of
the Celtix community working with any open-source JBI projects?

Yes.

Are members of
the Celtix community working with any open-source SCA projects?